


Broken Bones (I'm All Alone)

by Voidfish



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 18:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13840848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Voidfish/pseuds/Voidfish
Summary: Living again, picking up the pieces, is hell. There’s no easy way to carry on, yet Magnus has no other choice.





	Broken Bones (I'm All Alone)

**Author's Note:**

> READ THE WARNINGS! Please be careful this gets a little intense. 
> 
> Sometimes you just need to vent and heavily project on Magnus Burnsides.

It’s a simple truth he hides well, covers it like he covers his old scars. Magnus Burnsides laughs and smiles and rips arms off robots and never reveals the truth that he knows deep down.

Magnus Burnsides knows he shouldn’t be alive.

It’s something not to be discussed in polite conversation, or in any conversation at all. It’s a thought for when it’s late at night and it feels hard to breathe and the world is caving in. It’s for the small times when his friends look away and he is reminded how truly alone he is. It is a thought for when he feels everything at once, or when he feels nothing at all.

It is a thought he ignores, he internalizes, he represses, until he can no longer tell it is there.

***

Living again, picking up the pieces, is hell. There’s no easy way to carry on, yet Magnus has no other choice.

He lives, but he does it poorly. He barely sleeps, hardly eats, throws himself into combat at any opportunity. 

A couple of elves walk past him one day as he trudges to town seeking adventure, seeking danger. They whisper and call him “the Dead Man”.

He thinks, bitterly, that they don’t know how right they are.

***

Magnus Burnsides sometimes smells the smoke, sees the ruins of Ravensroost in his mind. He knows it’s not there, but it’s impossible not to reach out and grasp at the fire raging in the Craftsman’s Corridor.

One night Taako makes dinner, and Magnus is proud of him, so proud of him working through what he refuses to talk about. He’s proud until he smells the smoke coming off the dish and suddenly he can’t breathe. 

It’s not a flashback, because flashbacks are things that people who have gone through hell have, people that are deserving of love and affection. He is not that. He is fine.

He feels his mind haze over as memories pour into his head. How it smelled, the feelings, the pure dread as he ran across the town checking desperately for help, for any sign of life, for any sign of Julia. He’s not reliving them, simply experiencing them, feeling them shake him to the core. He knows he should get up and keep going but he can’t. It feels like the end.

Magnus is a strong man, he is not a broken man, he tells himself, and yet he smells the smoke and he crumbles.

***

He sees Julia in his dreams. She’s beautiful, she always has been, cutting up wood, eyes firmly on the task ahead of her.

He doesn’t want to speak, doesn’t want to ruin the majesty of the moment, but eventually she turns and she smiles at him.

He takes a step and she is up in ashes.

***

He should be where Julia is. Magnus Burnsides was supposed to burn with Ravensroost. He keeps this fact with him, hides it, carries it close to his chest.

He meets Istus, god of fate, and he knows she sees the truth, the way she sadly looks in his eyes.

She takes a hand and wipes away the tears that fall from his face.

“Take me with you,” he whispers.

She shakes her head. “It’s not your time.” She presses her forehead against his, and for a moment he feels warm. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

***

It’s the little things that drive him crazy. The small things he can’t hear without falling, without panicking and spiralling and punching walls. The times at night he’ll think how Julia would love the Bureau only to remember she no longer has the opportunity to. The smell of fire that sends him into a panic until someone has to turn the fire off and lead him away. The moments he finds himself frozen. He doesn’t know what they mean, why they’re there. Why they won’t go away.

***

Kalen’s name becomes a word of great fear, of great power. The thought sends him shuddering. The man’s face brings him to his knees.

It’s horrible that a single man should have that much power over someone else.

***

When Magnus learns to let go it’s a relief. He finally learns to escape from his feelings, from his body.

No one teaches Magnus to escape from the crushing realities of life, but no one teaches him to get back into his body, either.

It’s strange to find yourself floating, memories and feelings passing by. You are barely tethered to your own body. 

Magnus manages to stumble through conversations, through training and work days, mostly in the clear.

Taako sees him, but he doesn’t say anything. He simply nods and leads Magnus back to his room on the days when it’s hard to tell what’s left and what’s right. 

***

In the aftermath he’s numb. The first month he barely cries - he can’t do much, can barely breathe. 

What’s worse than the apathy is when it finally fades. 

It hits him like a train. That there’s no going back, there’s no changing this reality. These are scars he will have to learn to live with. 

He doesn’t know if he can, but he has to try. For Julia.

***

Magnus wants to die, but he doesn’t know how to. He wants to live, but he’s not sure he can. He sees no future for himself - only the past, left on repeat, graphic and lonely and so painful. He doesn’t know where to go. There is nowhere to go, nothing to do.

Magnus floats, and when he closes his eyes, he sees ruins.

***

Magnus seeks strength but he knows he doesn’t have it. He has strength in saving his friends, in protecting them, in fighting for them, but in nothing else.

Because if he was strong he wouldn’t sob at the smoke that fills his room in dreams, he wouldn’t tremor at simple words, he wouldn’t be so broken.

But he is. He’s a broken man.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is @infernaltwink, yell at me


End file.
